Little Great Island illustrates in microcosm the greatest changes of our time and the unyielding power of love.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Kate Woodworth’s Little Great Island, which is out May 6th 2025.
On Little Great Island, climate change is disrupting both life and love.
After offending the powerful pastor of a cult, Mari McGavin has to flee with her six-year-old son. With no money and no place else to go, she returns to the tiny Maine island where she grew up—a place she swore she’d never see again. There Mari runs into her lifelong friend Harry Richardson, one of the island’s summer residents, now back himself to sell his family’s summer home. Mari and Harry’s lives intertwine once again, setting off a chain of events as unexpected and life altering as the shifts in climate affecting the whole ecosystem of the island…from generations of fishing families to the lobsters and the butterflies.
Sunrise on the Open Sea
Mari
Levi, hunched in the deck chair next to Mari, is nearly asleep. Small wonder, Mari thinks. The sky has barely yielded its stars. The hum of the Alice-Mari’s engine is a lullaby. The insides of Mari’s own eyelids feel lined in sandpaper.
Her father, at the helm, is a silhouette against the first shades of dawn. In the two weeks Mari’s been home, she and her father have talked lobster and island news and weather. Mari feels all the subjects unspoken between them waiting. Unlike her mother, her father won’t push her. As a fisherman, he’s used to days of silence, or perhaps his preferred conversation is with the sea. Mari, who developed the habit of assuring the newly planted vegetables at God’s Bounty that she’d do her best to nurture them, realized that this bond with the natural world was something she shared with her father. Now Little Great Island is a half-mirage on the horizon, and her father’s blue-and-yellow buoys dot the water. He throttles back the engine. A quartet of gulls gathers above the stern.
“Ready now,” he says, and drops their speed again. As they approach the buoy, he
grabs the gaff hook, watches the water, hooks the buoy line, and threads it in the hauler. Although age has slackened him and weather has left its lines, his muscles are still powerful.
“All right,” he says. “Here we go.”
The choreography of trap hauling comes back instantly. Mari, wide-stanced on the boat’s starboard side like her father, watches the ocean until the trap appears, breaks the sea surface, and dangles midair. Her father reaches, pulls it onboard. Even half asleep, her body readies for the rhythm of hauling and rebaiting traps: grab, pull, clean, plunge her gloved hand into the bait barrel to refill the bait bag.
Once the trap’s on the boat and opened, her father sorts the catch by eye. Two lobsters too small for market go right back in the water. A good-sized lobster flails claws and legs as her father examines its underbelly.
“Berried,” he says and clips a V-shaped notch from the creature’s tail before dropping it overboard. The berries are actually eggs, and egg-bearing females are marked and released to help ensure the continuing health of the population. Once the traps are emptied and refreshed, the whole line goes back in the sea, and they head to the next one.
Shapes of other lobster boats become visible in the growing light.
“Mom wants you to retire,” Mari says. “Move to the mainland.”
“Aye-yup.”
“You going to?”
“This here is what I want,” her father says. “But hell, we’re not getting any younger.”
“I can’t picture you on the mainland.”
“Made some sense for a while there. Now that you’re back, I’m not so sure.”
Mari double-checks that Levi is still asleep. “I know you want to know what happened,” she tells her father.
“Your story. I’m not going to pry.”
But talking with her father is so much easier than talking with her mother. Mari briefly relates her first meeting with Pastor Aaron and Caleb: a couple of farmers selling produce in a parking lot, a parry about organic produce versus maximizing yield that was more flirtation than debate, an invitation from Pastor Aaron to visit the farm. What Mari doesn’t mention is how the hair on her arms had stood straight, as if drawn to Caleb by magnetics.
“I barely noticed the religious aspects.”
Her father is heading for the next trap line, but at half speed. No doubt he’s giving her time to talk. His head tips slightly, meaning yes, he hears her.
It’s true the farm was called God’s Bounty and the head farmer and his wife were addressed as Pastor Aaron and Sister Ann, but what did it matter? Everyone was welcoming. The other people who worked at God’s Bounty, who were close to Mari’s age, were strong and healthy looking from their work in the fields. She’d spent most of a day there, with Caleb showing her around and asking insightful questions in response to Mari’s ideas about crop rotation and water management and fertilization techniques that didn’t involve chemicals.
He was the one to dig his fingers into the ground and pour a handful of soil onto her palm. She caught his grin when she reflexively brought the dirt to her face and sniffed it. Inside the cow barn, he stood so close to her that she couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying.
“Seemed like there were lots of opportunities to phase in some regenerative techniques, which was something I really wanted to do,” Mari tells her father, trying to dismiss her husband’s image as the next set of traps comes into view.
“Everyone seemed receptive to my ideas about farming in a way that reduces the negative environmental impact. I truly believed I’d found the life I wanted, one that married what I believed and what I’d learned and that could make a difference on an existing farm.”
The engine slows again. Her father takes up the gaff hook, but this time he hands it to her, and they switch roles. The traps Mari hauls yield mud, seaweed, a dead crab, and a half-dozen lobster. Two are large enough to keep, and the others are returned to the water.
Around the time Mari left for college, her father had brought in four or five hundred pounds of lobster a day. The season’s still early, but so far, his best day’s been sixty pounds.
“All these damn changes,” he says, shaking his head: the warming temperatures, the increasing salinity, the extreme tides, the death of one species and the thriving of others. The growth of aquaculture, the wind turbines, the severity of storms, the increase in boat traffic, the encroachment of foreigners, the tempers that burn in every discussion about how best to use and protect the bounty of the sea.
When Mari’s father resumes his place at the helm and the line is overboard, he shifts the boat to neutral and swigs the coffee that’s been sitting in the mug holder for an hour.
“I’m glad you found the life you wanted,” he says. “Even if it turned out not to be with the right people.” His look tells her he hopes she’ll say more.
